The Bounty Hunter

Poor Jennifer Aniston. She is soooooo pretty, but her movies are so ugly. It's like she made a deal with the devil to have eternal beauty and a career in movies, but he pulled the old switcheroo by making those movies ones like The Bounty Hunter.

Aniston stars as Nicole - a New York newspaper reporter who is out on bail for a seemingly ridiculous charge of assaulting a police officer (when you see the movie, you will see it is ridiculous and not a real assault on one of the boys in blue). On the day of her court appearance, one of Nicole's sources calls with information on a major story she is pursuing, so she runs off to meet him. Of course, this means she misses her court date and a bench warrant is issued for Nicole's arrest.

Gerard Butler stars as Milo - a former New York police detective who has become a bounty hunter. Also, he used to be married to Nicole. Now, he has been given the assignment of bringing her in, and that's where the hilarity (hypothetically) begins.

Will Milo be able to capture Nicole?

Will she be able to break the big story?

Will true love spring eternal and bring the two back together again?

The Bounty Hunter is a mess. Director Andy Tennant presents a movie with a confused tone as it ranges from romance to madcap comedy to serious crime drama. Maybe it's possible to combine all of those into a good movie, but Tennant can't do it.

Cartoonish characters, like the woman who works at Milo's bail bondsman or a co-worker who has a crush on Nicole, are not even close to reality, when the rest of the movie is trying to be more realistic than campy (most of the time).

Tennant puts together scenes of tough guys threatening Nicole's source with bodily harm directly next to wacky slapstick or goofy comedy in jarring fashion without slowly building between one or the other to make it a more comfortable transition for the audience. Plus, those more dangerous and dramatic scenes are overdone and fake, while the comedy is dependent on tired sight gags and ridiculous behavior that is moronic instead of funny.

Writer Sarah Thorp doesn't help matters. In the middle of the movie, the plot about Nicole's big story is completely lost, only to get tacked back onto the end. Worst of all, you never get a sense of why the marriage between Milo and Nicole ended. Thorp needs to make a better effort to explain what happened to cause these two to bicker incessantly. Were they over dedicated to their jobs? Did they have disagreements about the direction of their lives? We don't really know until it is too late. Even then, it feels like a half-hearted effort to explain things long after we stopped caring.

Then, we have to deal with the Butler/Aniston pairing. Both are fine on their own, but I never felt any chemistry watching them together. The bickering between the characters seems forced, and the romance even more so. It always feels like the two are reading their lines as opposed to becoming the characters. Maybe the two are doing the horizontal mambo in real life, but the heat doesn't come through on screen (and I don't think they are good enough actors to hide it).

The Bounty Hunter will make you laugh a few times, so it's not a complete loss, but it's also not worth the price of admission.

The Bounty Hunter is rated PG-13 for sexual content including suggestive comments, language and some violence.